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NOTE: This thread originally began as part of a message in the QUERY: "laissez faire" or
"laisser faire"?
 
Well, I should probably separate this slower thread out from the laisse... faire one. 
 
It has been argued, not unreasonably, that the internet might be a metaphorical location,
and thus not unreasonably capitalized like Paris or Poland. However, I would say that it
is a lot more like the telephone, or the radio, or television. Someone is "on the
telephone" or "on the radio" or on "television" whose locations, with the exception
perhaps of the first one, are at least as nebulous and vague as the cyberspace of the
internet (I refuse to go along with
this new convention). Needless to say, none of these is capitalized, although "TV" is.  So
why should  internet be?
 
My guess is that whoever started it or talked Microsoft into installing it in their spell
check, it is an artifact of the dot.com bubble of the 1990s.  The
internet was viewed as such a wonderful new and great thing, almost a god, that it had to
be capitalized, at least in the US where it was seen as the cutting
edge of American economic and technological dominance in the world. 
 
It is not out of the question that this capitalization was even pushed or encouraged by
those seeking to extend the bubble. I am reminded that the city of New Orleans was founded
as a result of John Law trying to justify the Mississippi Bubble of 1719. A law was passed
at his behest to pick up vagrants and the unemployed off the streets and ship them off to
the colony to make a real fundamental happen there. They were the first residents of what
is now New Orleans.
 
Barkley Rosser 
 
 
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